


Poison in Your Veins

by antonomasia09



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: BAMF Zeph (Killjoys), Biology Saves The Day, Dubious Science, Fancy may be an asshole but he's our asshole, Gen, Minor Gared/Pree (Killjoys), POV Zeph (Killjoys), Poisoning, Seizures, The Royale (Killjoys)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 08:23:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16929801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antonomasia09/pseuds/antonomasia09
Summary: When Fancy gets poisoned, Zeph races against the clock to save his life.





	Poison in Your Veins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [keita52](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keita52/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! This takes place sometime vaguely in early season 3, and it’s kinda canon-divergent, but you could also pretend that it just happened off-screen and nobody ever found out. Thanks alyyks for beta reading, cheerleading, and keeping me on-task!

The moment Fancy walked into the Royale, Zeph could tell there was something wrong with him. Gait a little stiff, balance a little off, breathing a little too shallow. He wasn’t wounded — there was no blood, no tell-tale bulge of bandaging, and he wasn’t favoring either leg — but something was causing him pain. She moved to get a closer look as he made his way to the bar and rapped on it for Pree’s attention.

“I need a glass of Red Sand,” Fancy said, raising his voice to be heard over the background music, and that wasn’t right either. Red Sand was commonly drunk by yttrium miners who had inhaled a little too much dust in the mines and needed to calm their breathing, not anything a killjoy would ask for. Pree frowned at him, seeming confused as well.

“You don’t look so good,” he said.

“I’m fine,” Fancy growled. He put a hand down on the bar and tried to look like he was casually leaning, but Zeph was pretty sure he was actually using it to keep himself upright. She started checking off symptoms in her head. “Muscle stiffness, rapid heart rate, sweating,” she muttered. Arcturon poison. Deadly if not treated within three hours; high chance of permanent organ damage if not treated within the first two.

“How long has it been?” she asked him.

Both Fancy and Pree snapped their attention to her, Fancy stumbling a little as he turned. He hesitated as if he wanted to deny it, but both of them knew he didn’t have time.

“About half an hour,” he admitted. “I got jumped near the docks, and one of the guys scratched me with his knife. Didn’t realize it was poisoned until my muscles started locking up.”

“Hold on, poison?” Pree exclaimed. “Fancy, who did you piss off this week?”

“I could write you a list, but I would die before I finished it,” Fancy replied, his tone even.

Zeph mostly tuned them out, mentally going over the list of ingredients she was going to need for the antidote. “Pree,” she interrupted. “I assume you keep a medical kit around for the sexers?”

He nodded. “Upstairs, second door on the left. Tell Gared it’s an emergency.”

Zeph was heading for the stairs practically before he’d finished speaking. She burst into the room without knocking, ignoring Gared’s shout of surprise as he dropped his knitting needles. “Don’t have time, it’s an emergency,” she said. “Need your medical kit.”

Gared scrambled up immediately. He opened a closet door and pulled out a canvas bag, which he handed to her. “Is someone hurt?” he asked. “It’s not Pree, is it?”

“Pree’s fine,” she assured him. “You may want to get down there, though.” He nodded and rushed out.

She rifled through the bag, grabbing anything she thought might be useful. A painkiller, a mild sedative, and… there! A packet of malinthene, a drug often used to reverse Euphoria overdoses. Hopefully, its molecules would bind to the poison better than Fancy’s muscle tissue did.

Zeph headed back down to the bar. Fancy was seated on a stool now, hunched over and glaring at his left arm, which was twitching intermittently. The Royale had emptied out while she was upstairs — Gared’s doing, no doubt — and Pree had turned the music off. “I need a hundred milliliters of your cheapest hokk,” she told Pree.

“For yourself or for the antidote?”

She glared at him. “The _antidote._ ”

“Had to be sure,” he said with a wink, then poured a glass and slid it over to her. Zeph dumped the malinthene and sedative in, and stirred the solution with a straw until the powders had dissolved.

“Here,” she said, holding the drink out to Fancy.

He didn’t take it immediately. “Why are you helping me?” he asked. “Any of you? You two barely even know me,” he said, indicating Zeph and Gared, then turned to Pree and added, “and you don’t like me.”

“Are you kidding?” Pree said. “That doesn’t mean we want you dead.”

Zeph rolled her eyes and motioned at him to hurry up. “You can have an existential crisis when you’re not in imminent danger of organ failure.”

Fancy still looked uncertain, but he took the glass from her and drained it in one swallow, not even flinching at the burn of the cheap alcohol.

“Is it working?” Pree asked. “How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” Fancy said. “I think I…” He trailed off, his mouth working soundlessly for a moment, before his eyes rolled back in his head. He slipped off the stool to land in a heap on the ground, his arms and legs thrashing involuntarily. The rest of them backed away quickly, Gared moving the stool so that it wouldn’t fall on Fancy.

“ _Shit,_ ” Zeph said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. That should have worked — the antidote for arcturon is malinthene. Unless…”

“Unless?” Pree prompted.

“Unless it wasn’t arcturon. I’m going to need a blood sample.”

They looked down at Fancy, who continued to seize.

“I don’t know how long this is going to last, and we don’t have time to wait,” she said.

“I can hold him down,” Gared offered.

“Be careful, sweetheart,” Pree said as Gared took his jacket off in preparation.

Zeph raced back up the stairs and grabbed a syringe, a needle, and another packet of malinthene from the medical kit. The moment Gared wrapped Fancy in a bear hug, she jammed the needle into the crook of Fancy’s elbow. Gared grunted as Fancy kneed him in the gut, but didn’t let go. She drew up enough blood to fill the syringe, and then nodded at Gared to release him.

“I need more hokk,” she told Pree. “Still not for me, although I’ll definitely want some later.” He smiled a little as he refilled Fancy’s glass, and watched as she dumped more malinthene into it.

Zeph injected a milliliter of the blood into the solution, then shook it, watching it turn blue. She grimaced. Just what she was afraid of - arcturon should have been inhibited by malinthene, leaving nothing to bind to the ethanol and change color. This had to be something else.

“I take it it wasn’t supposed to do that?” Pree said.

She took a deep breath. “No, it wasn’t. It doesn’t make sense. The symptoms are correct, but the chemical structure of the poison is wrong. I’ve never seen anything like this before…” she trailed off. Wait. That wasn’t quite true. There was something niggling at the back of her mind, a faint memory from her early days as a RAC agent. A trip to the infirmary for a chemical burn thanks to a careless coworker, but the place had been in chaos, all centered on a flushed figure in a small cot.

“Oh,” she breathed.

“What?” Pree said.

“I know what this is. Fancy likes building his own weapons. Mostly he makes gadgets, but sometimes he does biotech. Years ago, he created a poison without an antidote to tip his darts. I know about it because he accidentally shot a fellow killjoy who got in his way on a black warrant, and I got to watch her die slowly.”

“No antidote,” Pree repeated, his eyes wide. “So there’s nothing we can do?”

She plastered on a grin, although she was pretty sure it looked more manic than confident. “I didn’t say that. You happen to have the the best biologist in the J at your bar today,” she told him. “Just give me a few minutes.”

Okay, Zephyr. Think. It was mimicking the effects of arcturon, but acting on a completely different pathway. Alcohol and a sedative intensified the symptoms, so… maybe a stimulant to reverse them?

“I don’t suppose you have any illegal stims lying around?” Zeph asked Pree. “The stronger the better.”

He looked over at Fancy. The muscle spasms had finally stopped, but he was lying disturbingly still now, just the faintest rise and fall of his chest to prove he was still alive.

“Funny you should ask,” Pree said. “I may happen to have some jakk. Leftover from a friend.”

She nodded, and didn’t ask why he suddenly looked sad. “That’ll work.”

Pree hesitated. “He’ll get addicted. One use is all it takes. I don’t know that he’ll thank us for it.”

“He’ll be alive,” Zeph said. “He can be mad at us later.”

Pree paused for a moment longer, then dipped his head in acceptance. He slipped a hand under the bar, and pulled out a vial of jakk and the injector. She took them, inserted the vial into the chamber, and held it to Fancy’s neck.

“This will work,” she whispered, and pressed the button.

The effects were nearly instantaneous. Fancy’s back arched on a long gasp of air, and he flopped over onto his stomach to cough weakly.

“Yes!” Zeph punched the air in victory.

Pree and Gared crowded close to Fancy and helped him sit up. Zeph took a moment to breathe, release her tension and adrenaline, and bask in the glow of success.

“Better now?” Pree asked Fancy, who nodded weakly.

Gared lifted Fancy to his feet and deposited him in a chair. Zeph and Pree followed.

“Everything’s kind of sharp,” Fancy said. “And my jacket is very, very purple. More purple than it used to be.”

“Yeah, that’s…” Gared said, but stopped at sharp head shakes from both Zeph and Pree. Now wasn’t the time to tell Fancy what they’d done, not while he was still recovering.

“I still have questions,” Pree said. “Most importantly, Fancy, if you were poisoned by your own custom blend, how did random thieves by the docks get hold of it”

Zeph raised her hand. “I have a theory,” she said. “Fancy, can you describe your attackers?”

“There were three of them. Two men and a woman. One dark-skinned and dark-haired, one pale and blond, one pale with brown hair. All decent fighters, better than I expected.”

“Did you land any hits on them? Did you see them bleed?” Zeph pressed.

“No,” Fancy realized. “I thought I shot one, but she didn’t react, so I’m not sure. There were too many and they took me by surprise.”

Zeph nodded. “I think they were Hullen, and they got the poison from you,” she said.

Everyone looked at her, confused. “I don’t follow,” Fancy said.

“It makes sense,” she argued. “You’ve got your schematics locked away securely, right? But when you were Hullenized, all of your knowledge and memories got uploaded into the green. So any other Hullen who connected to the green could learn what you look like, what your ship looks like, your fighting style, your habits. Your weapon designs. And, as de facto leader of the Cleansed, you make a good target.”

“That definitely sounds plausible,” Pree agreed. “Do you think they’ll try again?”

“I’m sure they will,” she said. “Fancy, you should come up with some new toys, and protections from your old ones.”

He smiled ruefully. “I could probably use your help,” he admitted.

Fancy willingly asking for assistance? She pushed down the urge to check if the poison had done permanent damage after all. “Of course,” she said.

Fancy straightened his back and looked her in the eye. “Thank you, Zeph,” he said. “For saving my life.”

“Anytime,” she replied. “Well, hopefully not anytime. I don’t like watching people dying of organ failure in front of me. Especially not people who are frenemies of my friends. Asshole.”

“I’ll be on my guard now,” he promised.

“Not tonight,” Pree said. “Tonight you rest, and let me and Gared watch over you.”

Fancy looked at him, surprise and gratitude clear in his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Well, this has been fun but I think I’m ready for that drink now,” Zeph announced, heading back towards the bar.

Pree followed, laughing. “On the house,” he told her.


End file.
